You, sing me to sleep
by pondglorious
Summary: set mid-season, Will dreams about Alana.


She rarely enters his dreams. Never does, in fact, and he's glad- he would never wish of submitting her to the horrors in his head. It was hard to build walls between the people he loved and the darkness of his thoughts, but he built them best he could, though cracks were unfurling on them, crumbling them to dust. He doesn't want to imagine what aversions the tendrils of his psyche had to wrap around her. He'd rather keep her safe and clean and preserved in the spaces outside himself where gruesome death wasn't a prominent reality.

Unfortunately, places like that were scarce, and her entrance into his unconscious mind can't be prevented forever.

He wakes with a start one night, surprised that it wasn't a nightmare that pulled him out of slumber, not realizing he is already wrapped inside one.

Suddenly there she is beside him so organically as if she'd been there every night, as if she belonged there. She was all soft white skin and even softer red lips and sharp bones and hair falling in rich and shiny black curtains over her face. She smiles, corners of her mouth lifting to reveal bright white teeth, an attempt at friendliness and comfort.

Vaguely he wonders if he's still dreaming. It was hard to make the blurred lines between sleep and awake distinct anymore. They stare for a long while, eyes alive and gleaming, watching how their chests rise and fall in unsteady breaths.

Her body is cold next to him, he can tell; he can feel it radiating off her and he shivers. Her smile is warm, though, and his mouth turns up to return it before his mind even registers the gesture.

"I forgot you had one." She murmurs.

"What?" He asks, voice hoarse and hitching.

"A smile."

Suddenly he's thrown off guard, finally fully registering her presence. Moments ago she had been an echo he tried to catch in the space of fleeting time between dreams and reality; but she was there, and he was terrified that she was merely an instrument of his imagination. She wasn't real, she couldn't be, she didn't belong in this blissful reverie, and she certainly didn't belong next to _him_.

He tries to do what Hannibal taught him. He tries to think of time, place, name, but it's all lost in his head which is swelling with her company beside him, and it's entirely impossible to think of anything else. He's marveling at waking up to someone bringing comfort just by being, instead of waking up to tremors and fleeting terrors and sweat soaking his clothes and sheets and darkness collapsing in.

Will is too distracted to notice the way she's playing and tugging at the collar of his t-shirt absentmindedly. He catches her wrist forcefully in his hand, halting her wandering fingers.

"Are you real?" He blurts.

She ponders the question for a long beat, and eventually says in earnest; "I can't say so myself."

"Because you don't want to or because you don't know?"

"I don't know." Still he cannot tell if it's an answer or another concealment of the truth.

Suddenly he feels desperate, terrified that she's still just a dream despite the fact that he can feel the cold skin of her bony wrist under his palm, despite the fact that he can feel her body so alive and real and so close to his, but he's still so sure she'll fade away the second he averts his gaze.

It feels scandalous to look at her like this, though there's nothing crude about the picture, just quiet insinuations of a beautiful woman turning up in his bed in the middle of the night. Guilt washes over him, considering that this is invasive, seeing her in this vulnerable yet powerful state, his mind letting him see her tempting lips and sheer skin, clothes acting in a futile attempt at concealment. At least she is clothed; he's thankful this delusion has at least given him that. His cheeks pool with redness at the thought of the alternative. She sees his face shift into a demure expression as he shrinks away, and she smirks, but remains silent.

"Will you stay?" He asks, and can feel his heart pumping in his ears, the adrenaline rushing through his body deliciously in reaction to being this close to her. He's terrified and entranced all at once, terrified of his own carnal desire and afraid that if she fades away, he'll break into pieces. He can't seem decide if he wants more desperately for her to answer _yes_ or _no_.

"You know I can't," she says in a low voice, sitting up and leaning over him, her smile turning mischievous. "Curiosity, remember?" He wishes he didn't. He wishes she didn't. "We're not good for each other." She exhales. "You know it's not wise to invite me into your bed."

He hadn't invited her, he thinks; she's appeared from dust in the small empty space next to him, thoroughly uninvited. Not that he was complaining.

"But you need someone. You've spent far too much time isolating yourself." She continues. His voice is quiet and muffled as half his mouth is pressed into his pillow, and he reminds her, "You can't be my everyone."

"I can be your _someone_."

The statement hits like a blow to his gut. Seeing her lying in his bed only proves to magnify the ache, thinking of the way things could be. But he doesn't need any more false pretenses. She'd distanced herself from him just like everyone else, for the best, or so she claimed. Because of that, she couldn't be _anyone_ to him. But he knew she was right, though he hated to admit it. Time and time again he found himself denying the cracks in the foundation of his being purely because he didn't want her to see them.

She looks down at him again, throwing him a concerned glance. "I worry about you, you know."

Her voice was tilting in it's signature concern, and he might have easily been fooled into thinking it was real, that_ she_ was real. But the Alana in front of him wasn't the one he knew. She was a distorted image of herself, like her reflection in a funhouse mirror. Her coloring was awry, enhanced; her skin was paper-white, lips pure bright red, hair raven black, eyes a single burning shade of ocean blue. She was a perfect china doll, free of flaws and faults, though he wanted them as much as he wanted every other part of her. There was something unkind and unwelcome about her, too; a vicious smirk, a threatening glint in her eyes.

Funny, but not unpredictable, how his mind could take one of the purest things in his life and turn it into something wicked. But if this was the only Alana he got, he'd have to make the best of it.

"You have to stop worrying so much." He says, snapping out of his daze. He sits up with her, so they're face to face, and half of hers is concealed by dark shadows. "You have to stop _thinking_ so much." He was abruptly and acutely aware that he was probably talking to himself.

He cups her face with his hand, running a thumb across her cheek and brushing his lips against hers. He can name their exact shade of red: blood, as if her everlasting lipstick were made of the sickening liquid.

Their lips were so close to touching that it makes Will's stomach ache in wanting. "I'm not a monster." He mumbles as his breath lingers with hers. "I won't hurt you." His head is dizzying; he can't put his finger on why he's saying those words. She'd always been the one to insist on the fact. She didn't need reassurance of what he was.

Will's stomach jolts when she suddenly wrenches away from his grasp, strenuously but not harshly.

"Oh, Will. You already have." She says solemnly, calmly. He's about to ask what she means when he looks down at her abdomen and feels the hilt of a knife in his hands. They're sticky and bright red with blood; _her_ blood, and they are wrapped firmly around the wrong end of a knife, striking it brutally through her flesh in a single visceral thrust. He has no idea whose knife it is or where it came from or how it got in his hands or when he made the sloppy incision; all he knows is that it pierced her skin, tore flesh, marred organs, allowed blood to flow in rose red ribbons over his hands, creating an irreparable cavity. A perpetual wound, an inevitable ending.

An almost invisible stain begins to spread sheer across her black dress, and his hands slowly become drenched, the smell of copper rising in the air.

Maybe it was his empathy taking effect, but suddenly he was Abigail Hobbs, thrusting her knife into Nick Boyle, feeling his heart convulse in one last dying pump and then go still, feeling his lungs deflate in his dying breath, and then ending it all. He felt her panic and her shock and desperation, and then he felt her power, her satisfaction; all the emotions coming in a clouded whirlwind of empathy he did not want to feel.

"Shh," Alana whispers, retracting his hands from the knife, smearing her fingers with her own blood. But he was paralyzed, and the knife was his only grip, and if he let go he would surely fall apart, so in removing his hands she removed the blade along with it, opening the wound and letting more and more blood flood her empty.

He was gasping and shuddering in shock, revulsion at his own senseless actions, but even as the blood is becoming a haphazard mess all over the sheets and their clothes, her perfectly constructed veneer never falters, and she says coolly, "It's not your fault."

He doesn't know how it could possibly not be his fault. It was his fingerprints on the knife handle. Her blood _literally_ on his hands. And yet, she doesn't seem to be dying. She sits there, eyes searing blue and lucid, not at all the way eyes look when life is supposed to be escaping them.

"Shh," she whispers again, and pushes him gently down with the tips of her blood stained fingers, so he's lying again against the mattress, like he could fall asleep easily despite the fact that her blood was still coming in a crimson alluvion all around them. The knife slips from his hands and onto the floor with a clatter.

"I'm sorry, I'm _so_ sorry..." He murmurs in gasping sobs, but she retorts, "Don't be sorry. Never be sorry."

She leans down against him and rests her head against his chest. His breaths start to slow and become less shaky and frantic after a while. The blood was an almost comforting warmth as it continues to sweep in and surround them, and he sucks in a breath and waits for the moment he is wrenched back into wakefulness and it is replaced with cold sweat, waits for the relief that this is just a dream. He waits and waits while her fragile fingers trace soothing circles on his chest, and it makes him feel simultaneously furious and relaxed. He waits but he does not reawaken, and eventually, he falls into dreamless sleep.


End file.
